Perhaps one of the most elementary and hindering mistakes we make in life is to assume a linear relationship between events and causes in life. The reality is that linearity is not the norm. The 80/20 rule is simply a byproduct of the power laws, logarithmic and exponential tendencies of many of life's happenings. In this post, I will explain 80/20 and how to leverage it in all areas of your life, because life is too short to be a chump.
Watch This
What is 80/20?
The 80/20 rule also known as the Pareto principle or the law of the vital few, is a principle that states that roughly 80% of results are generated from 20% of efforts.
It’s a distribution that was uncovered by an Italian economist named Vilfredo Pareto. Pareto noticed that 80% of the land in Italy at the time was owned by 20% of the population. He also noticed the principle at work in his own garden! 20% of the pea pods contained 80% of the peas. This distribution has been proven multiple times in different sectors since its discovery.
The ratio is not always 80/20, it can be skewed all the way to 99/1 or even bigger ratios.The main idea is that a small number of critical causes tend to produce the biggest effects in almost all area in life. What is important is being able to identify these causes and leverage them to your benefit.
Examples of 80/20
In the video linked above, I go through 3 examples in real time, clearly showing the consistency of 80/20. The examples I use are The worlds GDP, the population of cities in Australia ( where I am from), and analytics on my own YouTube channel. ( make sure to check that out )
Some common examples often mentioned in the 80/20 discussion are how:
• 20% of criminals commit 80% of crimes ( Think of convicts that keep returning to prison )
• 20% of employees account for 80% of the companies success ( Just look at any sales team to see this in action)
• You wear 20% of your clothes 80% of the time (you dirty fucker, change your shirt)
• You walk on 20% of your carpet 80% of the time ( the walk from your bed to the fridge )
• You spend 80% of your time with only 20% of your friends
I must stress that the ratio isn’t always 80/20, but it’s almost always something skewed.
Why does 80/20 happen?
The 80/20 distribution happens because of the magic of feedback loops. Many people who have owned goldfish can attest to the following observation. You go to the pet store and buy 3 equal sized goldfish; a couple months roll by and the 3 goldfish are drastically different in size. Why is that? Well, naturally when you first fed the goldfish one might have been lucky enough to eat a bit more food than the others. This extra food allows the goldfish to grow slightly larger than the other goldfish giving it a slight advantage when it came to eating food. Over time this advantage gets larger and more obvious until the other goldfish can barely compete, and you are left with one big fat goldfish that just eats all the food the same way that your cousin David does at every family gathering the fat fucker.
Now replace the goldfish with Google or Microsoft and you can see how monopolies are formed. Other factors are involved of course, but this seems to be one of the primary reasons for the ratio.
How to leverage 80/20 Examples for the real world
Now that you know about the magic of 80/20, let’s go over ways that you can optimise your life using this simple principle. 80/20 is a mindset, being able to see through everything through this mindset will drastically improve your results in all avenues.
Fitness:
Two best friends decide to join the gym to build some juicy muscles and make the king of Iron Arnold proud. One of the boy’s trains 6 times a week and focuses on isolating each muscle with specialised movements. He does an hour of cardio after each workout in hopes of getting ripped. He works out for an average of 12 hours per week. He doesn’t worry too much about his diet, and has never counted his calories. The second boy takes a more minimalistic approach, he does full body workouts 3 times a week focusing on heavy compound exercises that stimulate his whole body. He does cardio only once a week and prefers to focus on high-intensity interval training such as hill sprints. He focuses on the diet keeping track of his daily macronutrient requirements. He only works out 4 hours per week. Who will achieve their goals faster? The second boy will. He will make more gains because he puts all his effort in the 20% of things that will result in 80% of the results. Instead of spending 12 hours in the gym like his friend, he stimulates his body effectively and gives it plenty of rest resulting in insane gains.
Work:
Jim works in a sales department. He spends most of his days performing small tasks that are delegated to him. he replies to every email and is quick to give anyone his time. Unfortunately, due to the workload, Jim only spends one hour of his day performing cold calls. He has been working hard for a couple of years doing everything his boss command, however, has been unable to create the results needed to be eligible for a promotion.
Ray works in the same sales department as Jim. He spends most of his time at work cold calling clients. He doesn’t reply to most of his email. When he uses email it’s only to deal with potential clients or critical tasks. Ray does not have time to chit-chat with co-workers. To him, if something is a non-critical task it can be delegated to someone else. Through his time spent on client acquisition, he has managed to secure 6 figure deals, making his boss very happy. Ray doesn’t complete half of the tasks in his job description but gets promotions regardless.
Ray is successful because of his understanding of the 80/20 rule. Jim is not successful because he treats all tasks with equal weighting.
Relationships:
You are divorced from your wife and can only spend one day out of the week with you Son, what do you do? Is it better to watch TV with him for a couple of hours or to go outside and do something? Think about this, we forget probably around 99% of our lives. The day to day shenanigans quickly disappears into the ether. Don’t believe me? Can you remember what you did throughout one whole day a month ago? No, we only remember things of significance such going away on that trip, or your sister’s wedding. Now back to your son, if your goal is to optimize your relationship with him, you are probably better off going fishing with him or shooting a few hops at the park. These things are will be the 20% that equals 80% of the memories he remembers with you.
Education:
I remember having a project management class for my engineering degree. Our assignment was to do a presentation in front of the whole class. A couple of my friends spent weeks and hours researching for the assignment. Come due day, all they presented was a dense and boring death by powerpoint slide.
I was to present the week after, I decided to take a different approach and look at the criteria of the assignment. I noticed that presentation skills such as eye contact, and vocal tonality scored high. I also remembered the professor telling us that our slides should be simple. So, my team and I decided to focus on simple and entertaining slides that got to the point quicker. We didn’t use palm cards and remembered our speeches making them far more engaging. A total of 8 hours was spent on the presentation and we received the highest mark in the class.
80/20 everything
To maximize your efficiency in life you must always be looking for the 20% that will give you 80% of the results. When you find these double down on them, make them your primary focus. As Tim Ferriss suggests, always ask yourself
‘what is the one thing that I can do that will make everything else irrelevant’, It might be cold calling new customers It might be eliminating soda drinks from your diet. Make it your mission in life to always look for these 20%, those motherfuckers are the true game changers.
You should also apply this in reverse. 20% of your job / customers / relationships / consumption / possessions / whatever are most likely causing 80% of your problems, aggravation, undesired outcomes. Get better at identifying root causes and problem areas in your world, and deal with them. Be fucking ruthless. Free up bandwidth aggressively so you can devote it to the 20% of activities that contribute 80% of your upside.
damn straight. This is really important if you run your own business. 20% o your clients bring in 80% of your income, and 20% cause 80% of your workload. If you have clients which belong to the latter group but not the former, drop them like a ton of bricks. That often in practice means not taking them on in the first place.
That tends to be true most of the time!
Right. And spend %80 of your time trying to suck your own dick, and you'll be there in no time! It's all about that %100 success story at the end. Awesome work guys!
Well if it's taking 80% of your time, you must have a woefully inefficient technique. Practice makes perfect, mate -- go forth and conquer!!
Ya gotta stretch to get the D!
And above all, remember:
-- Jean-Luc Picard
Also, it is possible to commit mistakes and still win.
Says you German bobsledder!
Watched this yesterday... Love this comment
the well from which springs "they hate us 'cause they ain't us"
Here's tae us. Wha's like us? Damn few, and they're a'deid.
I work sales & you're right, my performance has dipped as I've adopted more non-quantifiable responsibilities. Looking up the chain, the top guy really doesn't give a shit about anything other than getting his own sales through.
Great advice, I'll start driving this tomorrow.
I like that so many trp bros naturally gravitate towards sales as a career.
I'd say it has more to do with the fact that many people who come here are or have been in bad spots after fucking their lives up in a multitude of ways.
Sales happens to be one of those careers available to anyone who can perform (low barrier of entry), where someone can potentially make a lot of money without a lot of prerequisites.
Sales jobs are plentiful, most guys are chumps. That's why Sales is cutthroat, low barrier of entry means tons of chumps out there grinding it out, but you have to be better than them, and then better than the best.
Perhaps a common personality trait?
To be successful in sales you need an aggressive hunter mentality, the ability to quickly read people and evaluate whether there is something valuable to be pursued, and have a strong respect for the value of your time and what you are using it on. Also doesn't hurt that you spend pretty much all day talking to people and (hopefully) improving conversation skills. Also even the great salesman lose well over the majority of the time, so you learn to handle rejection better and not fear it.
Your comment is gold. Was using the principle of what you said to explain to a female friend of mine that all I need when talking to girls in the club is 3 mn. If after 3 mn, i do not have any interesting sign that the convo is leading somewhere promising, am out. She failed to understand it, but it’s a skill u develop the more u talk with people and realize some girls are just not worth YOUR TIME.
I think it's just because most users here are in there late teens or early twenties, and they don't have enough skills to work elsewhere
Or own businesses in which revenue generation is vital, thus, they are constantly selling themselves, their business, etc.
How's it going champ? Did you make changes?
I actually don’t think it takes more than 6 months or so to get into the top 10% of men. Most men are basic-bitches that watch Netflix and drink.
I lifted and went on Keto. Lost 50 lbs while putting an inch on my arms.
I got a haircut, shaved and bought some $7 H&M shirts and a couple of $20 pairs of H&M pants.
I began cold calling like mad and started my own business.
I got a hobby doing stand-up comedy.
People thought I was a goddam unicorn or something. 90% of guys are fucking chumps.
You are right, it might not take too much time and effort to get into the top 10%, but that's where the real competition begins. The closer you are getting to Chad Thundercock (top 0,1%) the more work you will have to put into raising your smv. It's like climbing a mountain that gets steeper.
Chad Thundercock isn't the top 0.1%. That's basically the 50 Shades of Gray guy.
Chad is the 10-20%. You can be Chad in no time. Yes the curve's rate-of-change of rate-of-change increases dramatically, but the post is about the 20% of activities that get you into the 20% of men.
You forgot game. Game is the most important trait to develop if you are not natty. Everything else is basically the 20%
I don’t agree that it matters to the extent that the above does. (though I definitely learned that on here).
This is going to be clunky, but here’s the thought:
(E.G. - “Frame” and AM can be fake it til you make it - which is as real as real confidence).
If lifting and fashion would put you in 10% then every second man would be in 10%, but that is not really possible mathematically, is it now? Lifting is only important if you are way too skinny or too fat. Fashion doesn't matter or matters little. Facial bone structure matters the most.
Don’t know why you came up with something that doesn’t make sense and then acted like I somehow understood it.
There’s lifting, and then there’s getting jacked. There’s buying a $130 shirt from Brooks Brothers, and then there’s buying a shirt that fucking fits (because you’re jacked).
Not everyone’s born a model, of course. Hell, I heard that some people are even born Indian. It’s all just a limiting belief.
what sort of business did you start? Good for you with everything else too.
Digital Marketing. 5 years later and have 30 employees.
Whether it is 80/20 or not, the main takeaway for me is to double down on the winners. I’m going to take this to work with me. Thanks!
That's exactly right, it's now always going to be 80/20. It will most likely be something skewed.
The section on optimizing time with your son hit home - it's what I'm facing right now.
Thanks for the advice.
As a boy who faced that from the other side, it's solid advice. My dad did something similar and even called me like every day for an hour and talked after school, and it did wonders for me. I loved and respected my dad even more than I already did, not only as a role model, but as a teacher and source of solid advice. Give your kid that strong masculine role model. He'll grow up to thank you for it.
Glad to help man/ Yeah it's an important realization that not all activities or uses of time are equal.
The 80/20 I see it fitness all the time.
What’s better 8 or 12 reps
Protein before bed?
How much protein per meal?
Should I take fish oil with food?
Stop.
Go work hard. That’s it. 80% of your results come from working hard in the gym and eating at your calorie goal
No, that 80% actually comes from sleep.
You picking fault with my post instead of just getting the message is the 20%
actually it comes from tren
Worthy comment.
I kicked ass in the gym for about a year with minimal results. Why? Lack of sleep, poor diet, and putting toxic shit in my body for the sake of partying.
Now I lift with the same intensity as last year, but better sleep/diet and.. wow.. look at that it's like I'm on roids but I ain't!
so many cant separate what tasks belong in the 20 percent. work smarter beats work harder
Elon is good evidence that there are returns to working smarter and working harder, though.
No one is saying it can't be done. You can't run and juggle at the same time if you don't know how to juggle or run. Running is a skill used more than juggling. Learn to run, and when you've got that down you can try juggling while running.
Agreed.
I want to congratulate the thread Starter. He has a true understanding of the 80/20 rule, and he did some nice examples. That's too often not the case, when 80/20 is referenced.
80/20 is represented by a power law curve. You have most of the population on what is basically a low-level plateau(often referred to as the 'tail'), ever so slightly inching insignificantly upward. Then the fun starts and the winners climb the hill. The rulers/experts/geniuses are way up near an unseen peak, as the higher points of the graph climb nearly vertically, into the clouds...
When the 80/20 rule applies, a handful of major models tend to drive the system. Ability to glance at a system, and see those handful of models jump out to you, and then ascertain whether you have (or can become, or can delegate) competent insight in those major models..., goes a long way in this world.
20% of this post is accurate, anyway. Your made-up stories are made-up.
And at the same time this is part of the good 20% on rp
Lmao so true. 80% of shit here is about bullshit and cuck this and cuck that. 20% of the time only real knowledge is being dropped.
Yeah it honestly sounded like bullshit to me. Don’t respond to your emails? IME you’re fucked. It’s important, and tedious to talk and communicate with everyone. Build relationships AND get shit done.
All I see is you talking about relationships at work but nothing on how your emails gets shit done. Stop automatically going into defence mode when something shakes your foundation.
Emails get shit done because you need to be a part of the team... you can’t just ignore co-workers, managers, or even reports. Being seen in a positive light and building solid relationships is probably the #1 most important thing to do
This is why VPs and CEOs generally say they have an “open door” policy. They do not see it as a waste of their time for someone to bring an issue to their table. They don’t isolate themselves to only do the “work”
The people that bring them issues fit the mold of 80-20. 80% is probably useless waste of time.
They keep their door open to just hope that 20 makes it through.
Makes sense. Yeah, I guess you don’t need to follow through with the work of 100% of what shows up, But I would never ignore my emails, and even unimportant people in the company structure can have an impact on your career.... reputation is just extremely important to me
He said you don't have to respond to all of them, respond to the 20% that matter. The ones from your boss, the ones from your manager, the one from carol about the cake sale can fuck right off. This isn't a hard concept to grasp.
I don’t think business is all business. Buy Carol that cake and she might speak positively about you for the rest of the time you work there
"Deep Work" has good advice for emails and many other office related problems
This is why I basically just do squats, bench and weighted pullups 2 or 3 times a week and get on with my life. It works. I'm busy. I look and feel 10x better than before I started a couple years ago. Maybe I could look and feel 12x better if I stepped it up but I just can't be giving 110% in every aspect of life 100% of the time like that and enjoy myself and have time for everything.
Do your biceps get a workout? Abs?
Doing pull ups correctly will work out abs.
Abs as an indirect muscle group (pullups) wont cut it with squating or deadlifting heavy. You'll plateau. Back will curl forward and you'll be wasting too much energy trying keep yourself upright.
True. I need to start doing those again. I use to also directly work out my abs. Well advised
I think this is starting to happen to me, although I do ab roll-outs once a week. Anything else I can implement to correct this?
In what way is spinal flexion performed during pull ups?
Iirc, pull ups will exercise the abs not through flexion (edit: unless you consider flexing tensing? Maybe they are the same.) but through maintaining rigidity (static exercise)
Kinda like planking? It also depends on the limpness of the lower body. I can do multiple forms of pull ups, one where I feel it in my abs more, making sure to keep tbe body straight through the upwards motion
This post reminds me of the outliers by malcolm gladwell. If you have'nt read it, you should. It's a great read. One of the books main points is that there is a small percentage of people who are signifigantly more sucessful in any given field.
Bill Gates growing up went to one of the only private school that owned a personal computer at the time (Early 60s I believe) and was able to rack up endless hours coding. Then when he was no longer able to use that computer, he was given access to the local colleges computer lab. He had tens of thousands of hours of expierience and thats why he was so much more sucessful than anybody else in the field. Now he's one of the richest men alive.
Another example is how most good Hockey players are born between january and march. The reasoning is that the cutoff is at the begining of january therefore they have a slight age advantage over all of the younger players. Their talents are recognised earlier and they are given extra training, sent to a better league etc.
If you can be in the right place, and in the right state of mind at the right time, you can really benefit. Wait for opporitunitys to arise. Work to be your best and do what you want in the meantime.
This reminds me of the story of the Trojan Horse. A 10 year war ended in one night with the strategic deployment of a select force.
Good post, though it needs a disclaimer: you must already be out working your competition.
Going through law school and other curve-based competitions, the top 20% simply out work everyone else. Basically, there are no shortcuts. But you can maximize your time.
The 80/20 rule applies from that baseline. For example, you and your study partner are burning the candle at both ends, smoking the competition. But you want to be #1. Well, he takes notes by hand. You realize that if you type directly from the book you will save time, guaranteeing you a good night's sleep, while he loses a half day each weekend trying to rest up. Work smarter and harder.
Your partner will remember more from writing than you will remember from typing.
Recent studies suggest hand written notes trump keyboard generated notes for the student.
Sourced; WSJ or Reddit iirc.
Sure, except when you account for the volume of text you're covering in law or medical schools. 100+ pages of dense reading a day into hand written notes is beyond fatiguing.
If you're into memorization, read Moonwalking with Einstein. When time permits, handwritten, in colors, visualizing, etc. will always translate better to long-term memory.
Great post.
The Pareto principle is one the earliest things I learned in corporate America and have used it to great advantage for myself personally (averaged a 20% CAGR in income the last 12 years). It really does apply in just about all aspects of life.
20% of all statistics are 80% of the time made up
Good post.
Just pointing out that your logic in the fitness section is flawed. The second boy gains more because of strict diet and better workout regime. The example misses the point of the post.
A better example would be for the first boy to have strict diet, a lot of compound+Isolation lifts, and a lot of cardio. The second boy gets 80% gains with much lesser efforts then.
No, you misunderstand the logic correlation to the post.
I'll explain for you.
Boy 1: Focuses a tremendous amount of time on the wrong things and has worse results. (80)
Boy 2: Focuses a moderate amount of time on the most important things and has great results. (20)
Exactly!
I really like your posts man.
Thanks brother, I like posting them.
So just cut the fat and go straight to the meat. 20% think 80% action. Like a line from senecca that says something along the lines of "we are mortal but live and demand things like immortals, not knowing how much time we really are given". A man can be 60 years old but only have lived 20 of those years.
I've always believed in a similar mantra, work smart not hard.
I don't believe it to mean don't work hard. It's just a reminder to myself to focus my efforts in the areas that will have the most return.
Clearly articulated, well structured, solid content. Great post.
IMO 10% runs the 90% of life, the rest is truly dumb luck
Could you expand on your point
10% is what gives you results 90% of the time...... The edge is narrow. 20% is way too generous. If it was that easy everyone would be as rich as I am.
Dumb luck. Just that simple. Bill Gates was just plain lucky, lot's of things go that way. Many of the great successful types, had an element of luck. People like to try to puff and fluff the real fact.
I don't think he was lucky. I think he was persistent, almost becoming obsessed with creating the product that was in his mind's eye. Just think, we don't have to deal with the DOS prompt anymore..lol
Yes but Bill rebranded IBM DOS to MSDOS and kept it alive. If you go back to his history, not his legend, you will find some dumb luck that made the difference. Really smart, really hard working, and really lucky. The first versions of Windows were so buggy that crashes were expected daily. Wild Bill kept putting out new versions built over the original buggy problems. He was lucky...I lived through it as it unfolded.
Focus on the 20% that gives her tingles.
For you suckers that only think about possay.
This is one of the best posts on this subreddit. I am surprised that this didn't get more up voted.
You win some, you lose some :). Glad you got something out of it.
This is not a democracy. Most votes don't matter.
MY vote matters.
+1
His vote produces 80% of the results
The MVP right here, thanks.
Can confirm that doing a four day a week, upper/lower split program will yeild some great gains in the gym.
"You are divorced from your wife..."
Well you failed already
This doesn't make sense to me
Help me out ?
Like I don't understand what's so crazy about this, I mean I get that I spend 80% of my time with 20% of my friends. So what? What's the thesis?
20% of your possible actions will account for 80% of your possible results
I understand that, i don't understand whats so significantly amazing.
It seems ive realized this same thing in a slightly different way, so yeah
20% of your time is spent on action A; which yields 80% of results. 80% of your time is spent on action B; which yields 20% of results.
Now imagine you stop doing action B, or do it less, and instead do something like action A more. You will experience way more results. For example, 80% of the average person's time is spent on something with no results; useless socialization, browsing social media, watching TV mindlessly, etc. Now imagine you cut all of that out for fitness, work, useful socialization, improving yourself, taking classes, etc.
The pareto principle can be applied to many things, obviously, but only has functional application in some areas. For example in dating, most people will spend 80% of their time on something that yields very little results. The biggest example is texting games, endless convos that don't amount to anything. If you cut that out and instead focus on the 20% that does do shit, say actually going on dates, physical contact and that jazz, your results will likely skyrocket.
The 80/20 principle is simply a way to critically look at your life and the way you live it. I don't think many people analyse and evalutate their life and their activities in terms of the results their actions achieve, therefore few realize that the activities they do actually give them almost or entirely no results.
The other way to look at it is that you get 80% of your best memories from 20% of your friends. Its a rule that points out that only a small subset (20%) of the things you do, or put effort into, return the most amount of something to you. That could be happiness, success, money, whatever.
Applied to life, the idea would be to figure out those things that return the 80% and do more of that to make your life into something you want.
80/20 is your new religion.
God, I love this subreddit. Thank you so much!
What book did this rule play a major role in?
This sounds exactly like first principles thinking
Do you think this also applies to the SMV? Lol.
The Fitness Section is something I agree with 100%. I only work out with weights about 3 times a week and for about 25-35 minutes each session. The thing is that I push myself during those sessions with compound exercises and make sure that my diet is on point. My body is on point and people do think that my workout sessions are crazy long. You can't out-lift or out-run a terrible diet that consists of a lot of unhealthy food.
At the same time, I see countless examples of the guy who works out constantly, yet is out of shape because of his diet and doesn't exercise the right way.
Does this mean I should be doing HIIT instead of long cardio for losing weight while I lift?
This is a great post, and a succint statement of the "The 80/20 Principle" book. I read it, and it's unfortunately a lot of fluff.
I agree with the idea behind 80/20, but there's caveats.
The 20% is not always a single action, but often a multitude of actions, as there are dependencies. Really getting shit done in your job won't matter if you do not manage to make your boss see it. So the 20% is doing good work, and making sure the appropriate people know of it.
The 80/20 approach isn't black and white. The email thing came up before. It's overly simplified to say "Email is a timesuck, so I won't use it anymore." It's often not possible to completely stop an activity. Suggestions like Tim Ferriss' single weekly email check and autoresponder put the burden on the sender. Instead you should find ways to achieve the same outcome in less time. If you analyze your email, you'll likely see that there are high activity and low activity periods. Focus your email processing around these times, and you'll still be responsive without needing to have email open all day.
The 20% is not fixed. You need to constantly reevaluate whether you are still persuing the most outcome producing actions. As your life evolves, the most important tasks evolve as well. Also often you go stale, and switching up things will get the results flowing again.
There are no magic recipes. Let's take a men desiring to improve his physique. He does a 5 day high volume bodybuilding split, and does 30 minutes of cardio per day. Now he switches his lifting over to doing a 3 day, high intensity low volume split, and has great results. So if high intensity lifting works, high intensity cardio will too! Wrong. The added hill sprints and bodyweight circuits take up recovery ressources, and the lifting progress stops.
Can we fucking stop with this bullshit? Paretto only stated that if you'd substract 20% of italian largest landowners from 100% (and then again 20% from that 20% and etc. recursively) you'll end up with 1% of population own 99% of land, and that 1% would be Jews — so vote Mussolini. That's the Paretto principle — «Take land from Jews and give it to Italians», none other were ever stated.
To me anyone who says this effor-results bullshit is just some stupid guy who repeats what others are saying without fact-checking (no offense, OP! You are not alone) to appear smarter than he is — and failing miserably. Ratio 80/20 doesn't occur ever in any kind of financial analysis and can't be used for decision making. Mentioning it lowers the intellectual level of this subreddit dramatically. This has to stop.
I'll summarize the post with one word: think
Think before you act
It's an utter fantasy to believe you'll be able to do 20% of the work and reap 80% the rewards in life. The winners are doing different work, but they're still working their ass off.
The only exceptions are blind luck: winning a lotto, a fluke speculation deal, criminal gains (risk for reward), genetic giftedness enabling you to not have to try to sweep up endless vagina.
The bullshit pitch of 80/20 is selling normie masses false hope that they can try less and achieve more. It's horseshit. It's part of why China and other countries are on the ascent, and America and the West is on the decline.
An honest principle would be working hard 80% of the time and relaxing 20% of the time, and if you're intelligent enough, you'll find more effective ways to work, and if you are low on the intelligence bell curve, you can embrace your life as a prole, or off yourself. The gift of intelligence is the same as the gift of beauty: in today's world, you're a good looking enough guy to be fuckable, or else you're consigned to betabux land and jerking off.
The world isn't fair; it never was, it never will be, no matter how much intellect is obtained, no matter how much one gymcels, you cannot replace raw gifts - which is what the grace of the gods are - with effort.
There will always be masters and slaves. The major corporations are working overtime to automate every last job, and you can fucking die for all they care. Do you think Uber boohooed about all of the fucked taxi drivers? And do you think they boohooed about how their own drivers are about to get assplowed by their big purchase of autonomous vehicles. Amazon, same thing.
Enjoy the decline
That's not the principle of the 80/20 rule. The point is you have 100% of your day. 20% of your actions dictate 80% of the results, while 80% of the actions are meaningless and at most make up 20% of any tangible benefits you receive.
The idea is evaluate the 20% that's the most meaningful and spend more than 20% of your time on it. Start spending 90% of your time on the more productive tasks and gain more results from it.
It has nothing to do with working harder or less hard. It's about working hardest and longest on the things that actually matter and actually benefit you.
Lets hope this guy reads your post
That thing about presentations can also used to churn out essays and any work in general. Now that I think about it, any sort of process that I consider mastered, I can do pretty quickly by focusing on the key aspects. This is a pretty nice reminder to focus on, and it's the same principle books like The Four Hour Workweek focus on.
so what am I supposed to take out of this?
Dont waste your time on things that dont give much or any results.
This is full of unproofed crazy claims. You're doing a disinformation service.
Says the man making a counterclaim with no supporting examples.
What are you referring to specifically? Just saying this is disinformation without evidence to disprove doesn’t help anybody.
it does because it gives you a heads up to not swallow down all information you're spoonfed without a critical mind. Use your own mental capacities to judge. I don't have time nor do I care to find the sources that OP should've presented - it just sounds like typical pseudo-scientific fluff that you could find on Focus magazine or the like.
I think the point is you can use 80/20 as a framework to improve aspects of your life. It’s not supposed to be science.
I would judge 80/20 to be generally true for most things.
80/20 rule baby. I’ll give a couple real life examples. 80 % of fuck boys will go to the bar in hopes of banging a chick and blowing loads of cash on alcohol while barely getting a number, ultimately going home and jacking off by themselves. 20% of men will work smarter by just matching with girls on tinder, getting her number, and escalating immediately for a meet up and getting a quick lay(with little to no money used).
Another example: 80% of men look and dress like trash, are overweight with a gut, and barely go to the gym. 20% of men actually take care of themselves, have a nice hair cut, dress nice, and routinely work out. Thus, the 20% that do take care of themselves are far more attractive and get more women.
We must keep fighting and rise to the top.
You’re not understanding anything.
Elaborate. 80/20 rule is often brought up here numerous times. 20% of guys get 80% of women. This can be expanded upon outside of that. 20% of the population own 80% of the wealth(not to be taken literally, but rough numbers). 20% of the posters YouTube videos get 80% of his views, etc.
You said 80% of men dress like trash. 20% work out and are fashionable. That’s is not what the rule is at all.
I get the rule (it’s essentially means work smarter, not harder). 20% of your actions can lead to 80% results. Those were just my own interpretations of it. If you just take care of yourself and dress nice, and are social, most people will be attracted to you. Most men do not. You can save more time and money by just going to an app like tinder rather than going to a bar and blowing money.
If 80% of results come from 20% of your efforts, and you try to focus on the 20%, you’ve now reduced your efforts. You can’t just reduce your efforts and focus on 20%. You’ll get fewer results. If we could attach a number to effort, let’s say 100 “effort points”. This would mean 80 “result points” comes from 20 effort points. Now try focusing on that 20%. Your effort points has been reduced to 20. 80% of your results come from 20% of your effort. Well since you’ve reduced your effort to 20, 20% or 4 effort points gives you 80% (of 20) of your results or 16 result points. The 20% comes from a whole. You can’t make the 20% the whole, it will always be 20% of the whole, and you will receive 80% of the results from 20% of whole effort. That’s what the principle shows. Not that 20% of correctly directed effort will elicit 80% of results.
Thats not how it works. If you have 5 different sources of business, then 1 source is going to give you 80% of your results. If you focus 100% (or just more) attention to working, developing, and exploring that one source, you should be able to magnify your results/output.
Quality post!
I reckon you could make a book out of this. If there isn't one already.
Richard Koch has a few on 80/20. I have read the sales and marketing one. Good Shit.